New IBM system aims to simplify advanced analytics capabilities

IBM announced the Integrated Analytics System, a new unified data system designed to provide fast and easy access to advanced data science capabilities and the ability to work with data across private, public or hybrid cloud environments.

The system comes with built-in data science tools, and enables data scientists to quickly develop and deploy advanced analytics models directly where the data resides. It’s based IBM’s common SQL database engine, so organizations can use the system to easily move workloads to the public cloud to begin automating their businesses with machine learning.

Because the database engine is used across both hosted and cloud-based databases, users can move and query data across multiple data stores, such as the Db2 Warehouse on Cloud, or Hortonworks Data Platform.

At the heart of the Integrated Analytics System are the IBM Data Science Experience, Apache Spark and the Db2 Warehouse, all of which have been optimized to work together, IBM said. The Data Science Experience provides a set of data science tools and a collaborative work space through which data scientists can create new analytic models.

The inclusion of open source framework Apache Spark enables in-memory data processing, which speeds analytic applications by allowing analytics to be processed directly where the data resides.

The announcement is a continuation of IBM’s “aggressive strategy to make data science and machine learning more accessible than ever” and to help organizations begin harvesting their massive data volumes for business insight, said Rob Thomas, general manager, IBM Analytics.